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How ambient AI is cutting burnout, upping patient experience

Clinicians at the University of Iowa Health Care reported a 26% decrease in clinician burnout after a five-week pilot of an ambient AI documentation tool.

Hannah Nelson
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Published: 30 Jan 2025

Growing clinical documentation requirements are a leading cause of clinician burnout. However, ambient AI scribes show promise for improving the clinician experience and alleviating administrative burdens.

Ambient AI listens to patient encounters and uses speech-to-text technology to generate draft clinical documentation for provider review.

According to James Blum, M.D., chief health information officer and associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Iowa (UI) Physicians, ambient AI provides several benefits over other documentation support tools.

For instance, ambient AI provides clinicians with draft documentation in seconds, compared to virtual or in-person scribes, which turn around clinical notes in hours.

Additionally, Blum noted that ensuring every clinician has access to a scribe is costly.

However, because clinical documentation burden does not discriminate -- impacting physicians, advance practice providers, and nurses alike -- UI Health Care wanted to find a documentation solution they could deploy systemwide.

"We wanted to expand this to our most needy groups, one of which was our advanced practitioner core," Blum said.

Once ambient AI hit the market for clinical documentation, UI Health Care saw the potential for enterprise implementation.

The organization selected a tool from health IT vendor Nabla due to strict compliance concerns regarding data storage and usage. After trialing a few vendor solutions that met these requirements, they found most solutions weren't mature enough, leaving only Nabla sufficiently aligned with their needs.

"I think if we were coming to the market now, it would be a different situation, but we had real concerns about the longevity of our data, how it was being accessed and what was being done with it," Blum said. "We were able to find a company that was willing to play by our rules, and it's been a really great relationship."

Enterprise ambient deployment

After a five-week pilot of the ambient AI tool, clinicians at UI Health Care reported a 26% decrease in burnout.

Following the pilot's success, UI Health Care implemented the AI solution across 3,000 providers, including physicians, residents, fellows, advanced practice providers, nurse practitioners and allied health professionals.

Currently, about half of the clinicians with access to ambient AI have used the tool, and about 600 use it weekly.

Blum noted that UI Health Care has taken an organic approach to ambient adoption. Instead of providing extensive training, UI Health Care provided clinicians with online video courses on how to use the tool.

"We didn't have to go clinic by clinic to coach every person on this," he said. "The growth has really been organic. People started to use it, and as they needed help, we received great support from the vendor, but we were able to implement this without a lot of bruhaha."

The next wave of ambient AI deployment will focus on nurse documentation.

"A lot of nursing data is very codified," he noted. "They have flow sheet rows, and right now, we don't have access to the API that allows them to complete those tasks. Once the Epic API becomes available, we're going to go full tilt into trying to make investments in our nursing staff to help them better use ambient technology."

Driving patient experience

Early insights from UI suggest that in addition to reducing clinician burnout, ambient AI is enhancing the patient experience.

Before each visit, providers at UI ask patients for consent to use ambient AI to document the encounter. According to Blum, only a small number of patients decline.

"The willingness of our patients to accept ambient documentation has been really extraordinary," Blum said.

He highlighted that some patients have described their experiences as the first time they felt truly seen by their doctor.

"Patients are saying, 'My doctor was paying attention to me. They weren't glued to the computer,'" Blum said.

In the past, whether providers were writing notes on paper or entering them into a computer, they could not focus completely on the patient. However, ambient AI allows each clinician to have a virtual scribe, facilitating more face-to-face time between provider and patient.

UI Health Care is planning to study the relationship between patient satisfaction and ambient AI further.

"We aren't quite there yet with the data, but I'm optimistic that we're going to see that there is a statistically significant change in the perception of their relationship with their clinician," Blum said.

Hannah Nelson has been covering news related to health information technology and health data interoperability since 2020.

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